On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Matthew Toseland
<toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote:
> Currently Freetalk duplicates - or is planned to duplicate in the near future
> - most of the functionality of the Web of Trust plugin e.g. it will have
> identity pages with message counts etc. The plan is/was to hide the Web of
> Trust plugin and just have everything under the Discussion menu.
>
> However, there are two additional plugins under heavy development which use
> WoT:
> - digger3's WoT-based IRC system. This uses WoT for spam-resistant discovery.
> - Artefact2's FlogHelper blog tool, which uses an identity from WoT to
> simplify key management and eventually to avoid the need to announce the site
> and to tie in with Freetalk for feedback.
>
> Plus, hopefully:
> - infinity0's distributed searching functionality in Library.
> - evanbd's Fritter microblogging app.
> - Private messaging functionality in Freetalk or a new WoT-based Freemail
> version.
So far I've been successful at slowly convincing digger3 to implement
most of the protocol-level ideas in my Fritter draft spec. I'm
hopeful that the two overlap enough that (eventually) the only
difference between Freenet-IRC and Fritter would be the interface.
Conceptually, this is fairly easy: both are a collection of short
messages posted by users, and both need to solve the problem of low
latency messages without insane amounts of polling. The same
related-links structure from Fritter works well with IRC. IMHO you
can treat IRC as simply a different interface to a subset of the
Fritter functionality: IRC messages must have exactly one hashtag,
which is the name of the IRC channel. (Then there's all the channel
moderator stuff like banning and topics, but I suspect that gets done
in a decentralized fashion that amounts to individual clients paying
attention to what the moderator publishes.)
So I'm hopeful that digger3 will implement most or all of the Fritter
functionality while I continue trying to figure out how to take
meaningful statistics, and that at most it would just be a few changes
to the IRC plugin.
>
> And probably more in future.
>
> Two basic problems here:
> 1. Code duplication: All these apps will need to duplicate much of Freetalk's
> duplicated WoT stuff (e.g. nagging the user if their identity hasn't been
> announced, setting trust etc). Most of them don't gain much benefit from this.
> 2. The same identities will be reused for multiple applications, and it
> should be easy to go from one to the next.
I'm against code duplication, and I'm strongly against have different
UIs that do the same thing -- especially if changing something in one
UI means it changes in the other! I'm also in favor of reusing
identities -- publishing a flog under the same SSK I use to insert
Freetalk messages and IRC messages is a good thing.
Note that this brings up the past discussion of trust contexts. My
recollection of that is we decided there was no reliable way to apply
trust ratings outside of the context they came from (when they come
from other people, that is -- if I trust / distrust a person locally,
it probably does make sense to apply that to all contexts). Any
unified UI would need to handle this properly. (And no, I don't have
any good suggestions for how. I'm also skeptical that it can be
meaningfully simplified and retain its usefulness.)
>
> IMHO the solution to both problems is to keep the Web of Trust plugin
> visible, and make it easy to use. We might want to rename it ("Anonymous
> Friends"? Any other ideas?). It is essentially an anonymous social networking
> system: Each user has 1) various applications, and 2) trust relationships
> with other users.
I dislike overloading the word "friend" between darknet peers and
on-Freenet identities. I propose "contacts" for the latter.
>
> So, the profile page for a Known Identity should have links (and possibly
> detailed information) for each of the user's contexts. So for Freetalk, there
> would be how many messages he has posted, possibly a list of recent messages
> and/or commonly posted to boards, and/or a link to a page in Freetalk
> containing such information. For FlogHelper, there would be a link to the
> identity's one and only flog. For private messaging, there would be the
> ability to send a private message (whether by a link or inline). And so on.
>
> We would keep the existing trust setting functionality, and we would have a
> similar page for each of our Own Identities. In fact, we would probably only
> need one menu item for Web of Trust, which would be a merger of Own
> Identities with Known Identities: A list of Your Anonymous Identities, click
> on one to go to its profile page, with the option to add more.
>
> The big gain is that you can find a message on Freetalk, click on its author
> and send him a private message, change his trust levels, read his flog, chat
> with him in real time, search or browse his published files etc. This makes
> the Web of Trust plugin both useful and easy to use.
I agree, this would be excellent!
>
> We should be able to set the trust level from the own identity which is
> logged in to the identity whose profile page we are looking at *on that
> page*. We should probably also have some indication of how much we trust the
> other identities listed on that page: although this complicates the UI, it is
> very important practically IMHO.
>
> As p0s has rightly pointed out, when we go from Freetalk to a specific
> identity's page, our main concern is him in the context of Freetalk: We need
> to be able to see how many messages he has posted, and how many messages
> those who trust him have posted, as well as their trust levels etc. The
> current plan is to implement this page in Freetalk, fetch the data we need
> from WoT, add what we know from Freetalk, and show a Freetalk-focused page on
> that user. We can continue to do this, we just need to fetch a little more
> from WoT: The links to the other apps. However I expect that most WoT-based
> plugins will just use the WoT identity page.
Click the name, get a freetalk-specific page that also has a link to
"view more about this contact" or something that shows the full WoT
page? That would also provide other application-specific links.
Evan Daniel
